I am Mark Omollo. My name means nothing serious, but I mean a lot to my community and our world. My most admirable qualities include gentleness, belief in my self ability, teachablity and love for fun.  I’m a good communicator, counselor, leader and I'm wonderful at resolving conflicts. Other than touring and discovering new things (or rather, new ways of doing things), I love playing live music. I’m a graduate of Maseno University (Kenya), where I pursued a bachelor’s degree in Education Science.

My internship with DOT has been one full of discoveries. Every week of coaching has added a new item to my knowledge bank. It is to my amazement to realize that four months into the internship, I’ve learnt more than five times what I learnt during my one year teaching practice as a school teacher (attachment period inclusive). I have greatly improved in communication, conflict resolution, organization and management abilities. My ability to organize and share information, for instance, is one of the things I admire – and this has been developing with the internship. Best of all, my use and application of ICT has improved by leaps and bounds.

Based in Ugunja Community Resource Center (Nyanza – Kenya), I have been able to train over 40 participants. Working with my community, this time round more objectively, has brought with it a new feeling of satisfaction and self worth. I realized one great thing; that for every endeavor all the society needs is leadership – good leadership resulting in the construction of a community market or bad leadership that leads to the disruption of traffic on the country’s major highways. We just have to decide what sort of leadership we want.

I’ve discovered how powerful positive influence is and that given a chance, I am a great leader. I have found myself exercising leadership almost spontaneously in most situations and always feeling an urge to impact a life. In fact, my personal project changed when I noticed so many despairing young women all over my surrounding. These are ladies who became mothers at a very early age. Being held in high esteem has resulted in my being sought out for various activities in and around my community of practice. This too has had an impact on my confidence and self esteem.

My dream is three fold:

• To further my education and develop my dream career (Computational Chemistry) in an international institution.
• To be a large scale entrepreneur, and out of this I intend to benefit my community by providing jobs to a number. Some great ideas are already in place courtesy of Reach Up!
• To raise and manage social institutions which will provide services aimed at improving the society. This follows my passion to see an end to the gross mismanagement of worthy social and development institutions in my community.

I enjoy this internship immensely.